Bruce Hedgepeth, MD

“Giving thanks is the most fundamental act of worship.”
~Jeff Peterson, Senior Pastor Central Assembly of God, Springfield, MO

If everyone was given a chance to take to the airways and speak or write a seasonal message centered on Thanksgiving and the concept of giving thanks, I’m betting that there would be so much thankfulness, goodness, and gratefulness rushing and swirling around that we would all palpably feel it and be positively swept up and moved by it.

If we could hear it all and read it all I believe that we would be moved to think of things and remember things from our past that we have forgotten but that we are indeed thankful for as well.  The fact that other people would identify and testify to the things that they are thankful for would jog our memories and that would lead us to more memories and more thankfulness, and on and on and on like a perpetual-motion giving-thanks or thanks-giving machine.

There would be remembrances of sights and sounds and smells and touches and tastes and situations and successes and failures and accomplishments and actions and laughter and tears that would evoke abundant memories about which to be thankful for.  And that would just be the start.

I wonder what it would do to our collective inner being to be so thankful for all that we have and in fact for the many things that we don’t have.  What would it do for the world at large?  What would it do for our country, state, city, community, neighborhood, friends and family? What would it do for you and those around you?  Drilling down even further, what would it do to and for me personally as a singular individual?  On all accounts, I’m quite positive that it would be a very good thing.  

So as the song goes “let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me,” so too, let there be thankfulness, thanksgiving, and giving of thanks more abundantly than ever before. And let it begin with me.

May your Thanksgiving be ever and forever, and ever more endless.